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Emphasizing the third sense of ''pharmakon'' as scapegoat, but touching on the other senses, Boucher and Roussel treat [[Quebec]] as a ''pharmakon'' in light of the discourse surrounding the [[Barbara Kay controversy]] and the [[Quebec sovereignty movement]]: |
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Emphasizing the third sense of ''pharmakon'' as scapegoat, but touching on the other senses, Boucher and Roussel treat [[Quebec]] as a ''pharmakon'' in light of the discourse surrounding the [[Barbara Kay controversy]] and the [[Quebec sovereignty movement]]: |
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{{Quotation|"Pharmakon was usually a symbolic scapegoat invested with the sum of the corruption of a community. Seen as a poison, it was subsequently excluded from a community in times of crisis as a form of social catharsis, thus becoming a remedy for the city. We argue that, in many ways, Quebec can be both a poison and a remedy in terms of Canadian foreign policy."<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |last=Boucher |first=Jean-Christophe and Roussel, Stéphane |author-link= |editor-last=Daudelin |editor-first=Jean and Daniel Schwanen |encyclopedia=Canada Among Nations, 2007: What Room for Manoeuvre? |title=From Afghanistan to "Quebecistan": Quebec as the Pharmakon of Canadian foreign and defence policy |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt80kb6 |language=English |year=2007 |publisher=McGill-Queen's University Press |isbn=9780773533967 |pages=128–142 |ref=p. 130}}</ref>}} |
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{{Quotation|"Pharmakon was usually a symbolic scapegoat invested with the sum of the corruption of a community. Seen as a poison, it was subsequently excluded from a community in times of crisis as a form of social catharsis, thus becoming a remedy for the city. We argue that, in many ways, Quebec can be both a poison and a remedy in terms of Canadian foreign policy."<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |last=Boucher |first=Jean-Christophe and Roussel, Stéphane |author-link= |editor-last=Daudelin |editor-first=Jean and Daniel Schwanen |encyclopedia=Canada Among Nations, 2007: What Room for Manoeuvre? |title=From Afghanistan to "Quebecistan": Quebec as the Pharmakon of Canadian foreign and defence policy |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt80kb6 |language=English |year=2007 |publisher=McGill-Queen's University Press |isbn=9780773533967 |pages=128–142 |page=130}}</ref>}} |
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=== In medical philosophy === |
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=== In medical philosophy === |
Pharmakon, in philosophy and critical theory, is a composite of three meanings: remedy, poison, and scapegoat.[1] The first and second senses refer to the everyday meaning of pharmacology (and to its sub-field, toxicology), deriving from the Greek source term φάρμακον (phármakon), denoting any drug, while the third sense refers to the pharmakos ritual of human sacrifice.
Look up
Pharmakon in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
A further sub-sense of pharmakon as remedy which is of interest to some current authors is given by the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek–English Lexicon as "a means of producing something".[2]
In recent philosophical work, the term centers on Jacques Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy",[3] and the notion that writing is a pharmakon. Whereas a straightforward view on Plato's treatment of writing (in Phaedrus) suggests that writing is to be rejected as strictly poisonous to the ability to think for oneself in dialog with others (i.e. to anamnesis), Bernard Stiegler argues that "the hypomnesic appears as that which constitutes the condition of the anamnesic"[4]—in other words, externalised time-bound communication is necessary for original creative thought, in part because it is the primordial support of culture.[5]
Michael Rinella has written a book-length review of the pharmakon within a historical context, with an emphasis on the relationship between pharmakoi in the standard drug sense and the philosophical understanding of the term.[6]
Connections to other philosophical terms
Derrida's use of the term highlights the connection between the pharmakon and the philosophical notion of indeterminacy:
- "[T]ranslational or philosophical efforts to favor or purge a particular signification of pharmakon [and to identify it as either "cure" or "poison"] actually do interpretive violence to what would otherwise remain undecidable."[7]
In light of Derrida's usage, the pharmakon may be cited as an example of a philosophically indeterminate concept.
However, with reference to the fourth "productive" sense of pharmakon, Kakoliris argues (in contrast to the rendition given by Derrida) that the contention between Theuth and the king in Plato's Phaedrus is not about whether the pharmakon of writing is a remedy or a poison, but rather, the less binary question: whether it is productive of memory or remembrance.[8][fn 1] Indeterminacy and ambiguity are not, on this view, fundamental features of the pharmakon, but rather, of Derrida's deconstructive reading.
In certain cases it may be appropriate to see a pharmakon as an example of anthropotechnics in Sloterdijk's sense of the term – part a "project of treating human nature as an object of deliberate manipulation."[10] This is consistent with the way in which Plato's "noble lie" is understood by Carl Page – namely, as a pharmakon, with the philosopher in the role of moral physician.[11][12]
Relatedly, pharmakon has been theorised in connection with a broader philosophy of technology, biotechnology, immunology, enhancement, and addiction.[13][14][15][16]
Further illustrative examples
Gregory Bateson points out that an important part of the Alcoholics Anonymous philosophy is to understand that alcohol plays a curative role for the alchoholic who has not yet begun to dry out.[1] This is not simply a matter of providing an anaesthetic, but a means for the alcoholic of "escaping from his own insane premises, which are continually reinforced by the surrounding society."[17] A more benign example is the "transitional object" (such as a teddy bear) that links and attaches child and mother. Even so, the mother must eventually teach the child to detach from this object, lest the child become overly dependent upon it.[18] Stiegler claims that the transitional object is "the origin of works of art and, more generally, of the life of the mind."[18]: 3
Example usage
In political theory
Emphasizing the third sense of pharmakon as scapegoat, but touching on the other senses, Boucher and Roussel treat Quebec as a pharmakon in light of the discourse surrounding the Barbara Kay controversy and the Quebec sovereignty movement:
"Pharmakon was usually a symbolic scapegoat invested with the sum of the corruption of a community. Seen as a poison, it was subsequently excluded from a community in times of crisis as a form of social catharsis, thus becoming a remedy for the city. We argue that, in many ways, Quebec can be both a poison and a remedy in terms of Canadian foreign policy."[19]
In medical philosophy
Persson uses the several senses of pharmakon to "pursue a kind of phenomenology of drugs as embodied processes, an approach that foregrounds the productive potential of medicines; their capacity to reconfigure bodies and diseases in multiple, unpredictable ways." Highlighting the notion (from Derrida) that the effect of the pharmakon is contextual rather than causal, Persson's basic claim – with reference to the body-shape-changing lipodystrophy experienced by some HIV patients taking anti-retroviral therapy – is that:
"the ambivalent quality of pharmakon is more than purely a matter of ‘wrong drug, wrong dose, wrong route of administration, wrong patient’. Drugs, as is the case with anti-retroviral therapy, have the capacity to be beneficial and detrimental to the same person at the same time."
It may be necessary to distinguish between "pharmacology" that operates in the multiple senses in which that term is understood here, and a further therapeutic response to the (effect of) the pharmakon in question. Referring to the hypothesis that the use of digital technology – understood as a pharmakon of attention – is correlated with "Attention Deficit Disorder", Stiegler writes as follows:
If in fact an appropriate therapeutic response to this pharmacology of attention is conceivable and able to be transindividuated, then the question would be to what degree can and even must these digital relational technologies also give birth to new attentional forms that pursue in a different manner the process of psychic and collective individuation underway since the beginning of grammatisation; new forms that make this network society arrive at a new stage in the individuation of this plural unity of the logos where the attentional forms we recognise as our culture abound?[5]
See also
Note
References
- ^ a b Pharmakon (pharmacologie), http://arsindustrialis.org/pharmakon
- ^ φάρμακον in the online Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek–English Lexicon
- ^ Derrida, Jacques (1981), "Plato's Pharmacy" In: Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 63-171
- ^ Stiegler, Bernard (2010). What makes life worth living: On pharmacology. Cambridge, UK: Polity. p. 19. ISBN 9780745662718.
- ^ a b Stiegler, Bernard (2012). "Relational ecology and the digital pharmakon,". Culture Machine. 13: 1–19.
- ^ Rinella, Michael A (2010). Pharmakon: Plato, drug culture, and identity in ancient Athens. Lexington Books.
- ^ Stiegler, Bernard (2011). "Distrust and the Pharmacology of Transformational Technologies". Quantum Engagements: 28.
- ^ Kakoliris, Gerasimos (2014). "The "Undecidable" Pharmakon: Derrida's Reading of Plato's Phaedrus". In Hopkins, Burt and Drummond, John (ed.). The new yearbook for phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy. Vol. 13. Routledge.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
- ^ Plato, Phaedrus 275a, Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet. Oxford University Press. 1903.
- ^ Rée, Jonathan (2012). Book review: You must change your life by Peter Sloterdijk, https://newhumanist.org.uk/2898/book-review-you-must-change-your-life-by-peter-sloterdijk
- ^ Page, Carl (1991). "The Truth about Lies in Plato's Republic,". Ancient Philosophy. 11 (1): 1–33.
- ^ Rinella, Michael A (2007). "Revisiting the Pharmacy: Plato, Derrida, and the Morality of Political Deceit". Polis: the Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought. 24 (1). Brill: 134–153.
- ^ Alexander Gerner, Philosophy of Human Technology, http://cfcul.fc.ul.pt/LT/FTH/
- ^ Staikou, Elina (2014). "Putting in the Graft: Philosophy and Immunology". Derrida Today. 7 (2). Edinburgh University Press: 155–179.
- ^ Alexander Gerner, Enhancement as Deviation
- ^ Meyers, Todd (2014). "Promise and Deceit: Pharmakos, Drug Replacement Therapy, and the Perils of Experience". Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. 38 (2). Springer: 182–196.
- ^ Bateson, Gregory (1978). Steps to an ecology of mind. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc. p. 317. ISBN 0-87668-950-0.
- ^ a b Stiegler, Bernard (2010). What makes life worth living: On pharmacology. Cambridge, UK: Polity. ISBN 9780745662718.: 1–3
- ^ Boucher, Jean-Christophe and Roussel, Stéphane (2007). "From Afghanistan to "Quebecistan": Quebec as the Pharmakon of Canadian foreign and defence policy". In Daudelin, Jean and Daniel Schwanen (ed.). Canada Among Nations, 2007: What Room for Manoeuvre?. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 130. ISBN 9780773533967. CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)